Leak: LG Optimus L3 E400: Who says budget smartphones have to look and feel like crap?

CDON, a popular online retailer in Northern Europe, is taking preorders for an LG device that hasn’t been announced yet: the Optimus L3 E400. Now if you’re the type of person who loves high end bleeding edge superphones, then you might as well just stop reading. For the rest of you, here’s what the E400 brings to the table: 3.2 inch 320 x 240 pixel display, 3 megapixel camera, WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS, quadband GSM/EDGE, dualband (900/2100 MHz) 3G, and Android 2.3 Gingerbread. All that for just 1290 Swedish kroner, which comes out to about $190. Now yes, you can better devices for that kind of cash, something like the ZTE Blade comes to mind, but just look at this thing. It has a design style that looks like an iPod nano and a Nokia N9 had a baby. The home button is an obvious ripoff of Samsung’s latest Galaxy devices, but that’s to be expected. LG seems to copy nearly everything Samsung does, even the skin that Samsung uses on top of Android. All that being said, LG does have a solid track record of making high quality budget Android smartphones, and this thing looks to continue that tradition.

The bigger question here is when will Google release a version of Android optimized for lower end hardware? Ice Cream Sandwich has been getting some rave reviews, but it’s meant to run on dual core processors and devices with a screen that pushes 1280 x 720 pixels. Rumor has it that Microsoft will release a version of Windows Phone called Tango that targets low end devices. Maybe Google should do the same thing with Jelly Bean or whatever they plan on calling the next version of their OS.

Roughly half of Americans don’t have a smartphone because they see them as too expensive and too complicated. There’s a market there, but no one seems to be paying attention to it. Why?